Political Science: The State of the Discipline II

1
Texts and Canons:
The Status of the "Great Books" in Political Theory

Arlene W. Saxonhouse

The arguments have flown fast and free over the
last several years, rocking the academic world: canon or
no canon? Is it Western imperialism, misogyny, and
racism, or is it the core of civilized discourse over the
ages? Are the texts we study and assign to our students
culture and time bound, reproducing the white,
patriarchal past in a multicultural present or are they to
be preserved as the focus of common discourse lest we
and our students drown in a sea of relativism? The
rhetoric on both sides of the debate has been powerful;
moderation has been a forgotten virtue. And the
subdiscipline of political theory as the study of great texts
written by earlier generations has not been immune to the
swirling debates. Indeed, it was a political theorist, Allan
Bloom, in his best-selling Closing of the American Mind
( 1987), who did much to bring this issue to public
attention and to set the tone for the debate. While this
debate has addressed the broader field of the role of
education in contemporary American society, challenges
from within the discipline of political theory have been
launched as well, questioning the claimed apotheosis of
certain classic readings: the works of authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx. Others have defended this core as being at the
foundation of our ability to theorize about the value,
purpose, and meaning of political life, and the courses in
which students read Plato et al. continue to be included in
the curricula of most political science departments.

Political theory as a field managed, though
barely, to survive the assaults of the 1950s and 1960s.
On the one hand, there was positivism, which denied
validity or meaning to the conceptual core of a field that
used such inaccessible terms as justice, duty, freedom; on
the other hand, there was behavioralism, which dismissed
the normative in favor of the empirical. The severest and
most powerful assaults of the last decade, though, have
come from within. John Gunnell, for instance, claims
that the core of authors and readings traditionally
included in the study of political theory is simply a
"myth," constructed by modern theorists with particular
agendas; others argue that those works that have become
part of the so-called "myth" survived by chance rather
than because of their status as great works, worthy of
careful reading, from which we might learn about the
nature of politics ( Condren 1985). Yet others have
turned political theory into a subfield of history,
especially intellectual history, embedding the classic texts
in an historical setting of language usage on one side or
political experiences on the other. To borrow the
language of David Miller describing this movement:
"[T]exts that we now regard as classic sink into the
landscape" (1990, 425).

Such attacks arise since in many ways political
theory is an artificial construct that lacks an independent
identity, caught as it is at the cross-roads of a multitude
of disciplines. While political scientists may see political
theory as a subfield of their own discipline, political
theory draws from (and is claimed by) history,
philosophy, sociology, literary studies, linguistics, and
women's studies.
1 At home in none, but enriched by all,
political theory during the last decade has confronted the
new threat of the centrifugal force of interdisciplinary
connections which have often led to sharply divided
communities of discourse. Beyond the isolation from
mainstream political science, the sub-specialties of
political theory informed by their various
inter-disciplinary connections have become isolated from
one another. Thus, at the same time that the very texts
we might have defined as the unifying basis of political
theory are under assault, the activity of studying those
texts has itself been drawn in different directions.

It is the argument of this essay, though, that the
texts that have come under such powerful and (usually)
articulate attack and that have been appropriated by other
disciplines have weathered the assaults and remain a
central part of the discipline of political science -- though
recent trends suggest that their survival is in no sense
assured. In part, these texts have survived the attacks of
the last decade because political theorists have not
established a simply defensive stance asserting the validity

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